


The Walls I've Built Around You

by solsticezero



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, Spoilers for ep 68
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-26
Updated: 2016-09-26
Packaged: 2018-08-17 08:45:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8137721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solsticezero/pseuds/solsticezero
Summary: Pike can feel it, when it happens. Of course she can.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Hello My Old Heart" by The Oh Hellos.

Whitestone edges closer every day to spring. Pike watches the cold draw slowly away, day by day, pulling the frost out of the dew in the mornings when she walks from her room in the empty guest hall of the De Rolo mansion and into town. The Sun Tree looks as though it might bloom soon; she can feel it, not as well as Keyleth would be able to, but there’s something about the great white tree, a feeling like anticipation, or impatience – like it’s waiting for the first possible moment to burst forth with a show of life that it hasn’t had in years. She pats it ‘hello’ every day as she passes it, and the energy humming through it tingles in her fingers and palm, before settling, warm and hopeful, in her chest. It seems impossible, how alive this place is now. People bustle in once-abandoned streets, and good smells of bread and blacksmithing and burning hearths fill the air. Pike has watched this city pull itself back together around her – and she has helped, she hopes, in her own way.

There was no temple to Sarenrae in Whitestone when Pike arrived; the people worshipped the gods traditionally and personally connected to the city, and it seemed right to her that they should. Keeper Yennen, though, welcomed her warmly, and offered her a space in the untenanted temple to Pelor, and insisted and insisted until finally she accepted. When she entered the temple, she thought she might have understood his insistence a little better; the temple was a disaster. The windows were cracked and broken, the front door standing open, and everything was weather-worn and wet with rain and snow. There was a large De Rolo crest carved into the soft gold of the altar, which she knew with a tick of suppressed annoyance must have been done by the hand of one of her cohort. The body of the temple’s keeper had been removed from its room, but the place still stunk of death, and of whatever other work had been done here, something chemical and unnatural.

But, Pike restored the temple. It was what she was good at. It was what made her happy, with her family gone, off facing the monsters that she could not join them to face, too needed here to leave. Percy trusted her to help protect his people, enough to leave them in her hands, and even though it hurt her every day to be away from the people she loved, she tended to Whitestone with everything she had. And, at first without her realizing it, the people began to take notice. They saw her pain, to be away from her family. They saw her efforts. Baskets of fresh, warm food began greeting her every morning at the entrance to the temple. Men and women, their backs and hands already aching from the work they were doing restoring the rest of the city, would come to her with tools, and ladders, and knowledge, and would work alongside her until the sun set through the tall, now-unbroken windows. They would laugh with her. They would thank her. They began to love her, and she began to love them.

In little more than a month, the temple to Pelor stood tall and gleaming, appropriate once again for the god of the Sun. But there was more, now, than before. Beside the altar to Pelor there stood a small but no less beautiful shrine to Sarenrae. The people had surprised her with it; they had walked her in with their hands over her eyes, children tugging at her to pull her forward, until they stood her before it and let her see. Now, every morning, Pike found flowers laid carefully at the shrine, and the people, many of them, came to her as readily as they came to Keeper Yennen, for guidance, for absolution. More than she ever had before, Pike felt like a conduit – so connected, to the town, to the people, to Sarenrae. It almost, but not quite, filled the gaping hole in her heart that was the absence of Vox Machina.

This morning, despite its recent departure, the frost seems to creep back into town, brushing its long fingers through the grass, crunching and shattering beneath her feet as she makes her slow way through town. The sky is heavy and metal-gray, and seems almost close enough to touch. The Sun Tree’s energy buzzes through her hand as she passes in the same warm, pleasant way, but the warmth fades and doesn’t settle with her, lost with the breath leaving her mouth.

In the temple, there are flowers at the feet of Sarenrae, freshly cut and brightly colored, but to Pike’s eyes there is something strange about them. The frost seems to have touched them, too. They look fragile, like too hard a glance will send petals scattering to the floor.

There is something in the wind today. Pike can feel a tension, in herself, her shoulders, her back, but also in the air around her. There is an ache in her throat, a pull at the corners of her eyes, and she wonders, almost with hope, if she is getting sick, if she has been working too much, giving too much energy to help Gilmore with the barrier. She wants that to be the case. Because otherwise—

“What is it?” she asks aloud, eyes rising to the far ceiling of the temple. The painted symbol of the sun, the element that ties Pelor and Sarenrae so tightly together, seems so far away from her, miles and ages away from her tiny frame tied to the ground. “What’s happening?”

There is no voiced answer. A wind, like the scout before the storm, batters around the outside of the temple, howling low. The flowers at the feet of Sarenrae flutter. The light, for what it is, fades further, ebbs the colors from the world, leaving everything gray.

And, in that moment, she feels it. It’s like a sharp and impossible pain, in her ribs, in her heart. She cries out and clutches both gauntleted hands to her chest, fingers curled, back hunched, breath caught in her throat. The pain flares bright and hot and then, just as quickly, is gone. In its absence, the dread rushes in to fill the space. Her caught breath comes back too quickly, panting out, adrenaline rushing through her, tingling her arms, her scalp, bringing confusing and unbidden tears to her eyes. Something is happening. Something is happening.

The flowers at the feet of Sarenrae burst into a shower of petals. The stalks curl, now burnt black and smoking – into a familiar shape.

A necklace. A pendant. Broken.

Percy.

Panic hits her almost before the realization does – and then the determination, stronger than has ever been, a certainty instead of a hope, that she needs to be where they are, that she needs to be where he is, always but _right now_. She can already feel the light, filtering into her from somewhere divine and distant – she can already see her arms, her hands, her armor, glowing gold with Sarenrae’s holy warmth. She will be there. She will save him. There is nothing in the world that she is meant to do more than save him.

At the front of the temple, the door slams open, and Cassandra De Rollo stands there in her dressing gown, eyes wild, hair tangled and windswept, grey streaks glaring against the dark of storm that threatens behind her across Whitestone. Pike is able to meet her eyes for a moment – just long enough to know that she, somehow, also knows – before she is swept away from Whitestone in a wash of gold.

Her unconscious body hits the floor of the temple of Pelor and Sarenrae just as the first drop of rain hits the streets of Whitestone.

**Author's Note:**

> From Pike's Spotify Playlist on Geek & Sundry:  
> "Hello My Old Heart" - The Oh Hellos  
> Working in the temple, Pike’s mind often drifts to Percy. The worry is almost too much to bear. There’s a battle for his soul and even in the temple, Pike goes to war for him.
> 
> “Every day I add another stone  
> To the walls I’ve built around you  
> To keep you safe.”


End file.
